As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part VI)

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IV

After that we went back to the hotel and made love again and showered and went to have lunch at some fancy restaurant in the Square. And then we would visit William Faulkner’s grave. It was located about three blocks away from the hotel, an easy walk and impossible to miss, according to the girl at the hotel desk. According to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s sign we found, Faulkner’s grave would be located “twenty steps” east of the marker, and it was (and this experience we didn’t have to share, thank God; making a pilgrimage to someone’s gravesite is awkward and strange enough without fellow death tourists. The plot was up a little hill and wedged between yet another hill and an overgrown holly bush; we walked around it and stepped across the low stone wall as if we were stepping onto a dais of some kind. The marble tombstone was modest, made to resemble a Greek temple façade: it could have easily been Renee’s and my names on the slabs in front of the marker, instead of William’s and Estelle’s, although—Renee had pointed this out on numerous occasions—normal people consider it exceedingly macabre to give this arena of life too much thought at our age, what with all the living we had left to do; had she, years ago, through some means of foreknowledge, known or intuited or suspected or in whatever epistemic manner became prescient of her ultimate doom, she would have, as surely I still breathe air, punched me in the face). And leaning against the grave marker, among the broken glass, I saw a wreath and an abandoned pack of cigarettes, and there were coins (some foreign) scattered across the surface of Faulkner’s slab and even on Estelle’s. But I didn’t see any discarded sour mash, and I thought, fleetingly, about the tradition of which I had heard of pilgrims at midnight drinking half a bottle and then pouring the rest onto the tombstone as a sacrifice, a tribute, sitting on the wall and yammering out their deep thoughts beneath the canopy of the white oaks and of the stars and probably irritating the bejeesus out of poor old Bill. But then again I’ll admit I’m a snob, and a pretty big one, too; if we would have met when the man was alive, he would have most likely, certainly would have had little use for my uninspired insights or my fawning, although it’s conceivable he wouldn’t have minded being around Renee. At this point she was playing with her lip, and she said,

“His middle name was Cuthbert? I always thought that was a strange name.”

“I suppose,” I said, crouching to get a better look at some of the coins on the grave; Renee was looking out over the rest of St. Peter’s cemetery. “Maybe that comes from St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Very famous saint, protector of the people…I’m sure the name is Anglo-Saxon. –bert means bright, I know that.”

“And of course,” Renee said. “Elisha Cuthbert plays Kim Bauer on 24. But I kind of doubt that that’s where his parents got it. With him born in 1897 and all…come on, that was a joke.”

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